I recently made the mistake of commenting on facebook after Mr Trump tried to tell Canada how to manage its dairy industry and threatened more trade sanctions. He seems to believe that he can tell every country in the world what to do and follows every command with a threat. Is that not the definition of a bully? I’ve spoken to my brother-in-laws in the USA and they explained to me that they elected Trump to clean up the corruption in Washington. In that, he seems to be doing a good job. He’s not your typical politician and he does not tolerate political stupidity.

Unfortunately the way that Mr Trump is accomplishing what his people asked him to do is damaging the reputation of Americans in the eyes of the rest of the world. I don’t think that many Americans trust the news to believe what is really going on. I’m guilty of not trusting the news because I have personally been misquoted by the media. It seems that the media has it’s own agenda and that has negatively effected their credibility over the past couple of decades.

So where does that leave the rest of the world? We are on the outside shaking our head at how the American people can be mislead by competing media organizations while their president gets things done by being a bully and forcing his will on the rest of us. I don’t think the American public are to blame because they don’t know (or don’t care) what is going on outside their boarders. They have enough troubles at home.

In much the same way that Hitler mislead his people by focusing on issues at home and quietly targeting ethnic groups, Trump has the ability to blind and mislead the American public. The media can’t report the news because they have no credibility and Trump has an excuse for every childish tweet.

When all the dust settles I’m afraid that Americans will no longer be welcome in any country but their own. It will take decades for the rest of the world to believe that America wants to participate in making the world a better place. The really sad part is many Americans don’t know what their government is doing to them.

If you’re in Kanata Ontario tomorrow night, stop by the Royal Oak on March road between 8 and midnight to help me celebrate 60 Years. I have an evening of live music in store with performances by a number of friends and my band.

Ther weather man is calling for snow, but we live in Canada so that’s no big deal.

Last week I received an email from the manufacturer stating that my high tech bathroom scale would no longer support pulse wave velocity. Pulse wave velocity is a measure of the time it takes for blood from your heart to reach your feet and is an indicator of arterial health. If your arteries are hard, the blood will get there quickly and if they are soft, the initial pulse will be delayed by the expansion of the vein.

This is a measurement that used to cost people money and was only performed in special facilities. The note from the manufacturer said:

“With our Body Cardio product, we brought Pulse Wave Velocity to a home scale for the first time. After routine review, we now believe that this feature may require a different level of regulatory approval. In light of this, we have decided to deactivate the Pulse Wave Velocity feature on January 24. As a result, Pulse Wave Velocity readings will no longer appear on the scale screen nor will they be viewable in the Health Mate app. Your data will be retained and is downloadable. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience and we invite you to read our FAQ page where you’ll find out more, including how to retrieve your Pulse Wave Velocity history if you wish.”

There are many different ways to interpret this statement but it seems that some external group forced the change. No further details are provided in any of the FAQ’s.

So the manufacturer did not ask for my permission, they virtually entered my home and removed functionality from a product that I already paid for. I wrote an email telling them that I did not want them to do this, but they did it anyway. I can’t pinpoint why I feel that I have been wronged, but it’s a strong feeling and I’m sure I will be able to articulate it eventually.

So I guess the concept of purchasing a product is changing and ownership has been blurred. I have so many questions…

Does this mean that IoT products will never truly be ours? Is it ok to allow external product producers to enter our home networks to modify their products? Should producers ask for permission or do they have the right to just change things? Was this an action to avoid a copyright infringement? If it is, is it right for me to suffer for someone elses mistake? Should this be tested in court?

If you have been following my BLOG you would know that my family has recently suffered a loss.

To add to that loss, my sister has had her memories stolen by a cyber terrorist. The family PC has fallen victim to CBT-Locker which is a ransomware program that encrypts all of your photos and text documents with a very strong encryption. They give you the public key and tell you to send them money to get the private key.

From what I have read online, there is no counter measure at the moment, so all we can do is preserve the files and the public key and hope that someone figures out a way to reverse the encryption.

So my sister lost her husband, her oldest daughter and large part of her memories.

You can imagine that this makes me very angry and makes me wonder what kind of people stoop to extortion to fund their other despicable acts.

The message we want to send to those people is not something that I want to say here, but you can image that it would be filled with a lot of explicatives.

On this past Monday night we lost two of the most quite and caring people I have had the pleasure to know. My Brother-in-law John Keeler and his 20 year old daughter Tiffany Keeler.

They were on their way home from St. Lawerence College where Tiffany was studying to be an RN when their pickup truck was crushed by a semi on the 401. Tiffany was a new mom with a four month old baby and this all happened on the eve of my sister’s birthday.

The investigation is on going but the driver of the semi has been charged.

I was just listening to a show on CBC radio last week about the safety of Ontario’s roads given the increase in Semi traffic and now I face the reality of exactly that. My Aunt Brenda was killed by a Semi and now my brother-in-law and niece.

It’s all still a bit raw, but the frequency seems to indicate that we have a serious problem. These vehicles are huge and unable to stop in the same way a passenger vehicle can.

There are too many trucks on Ontario roads with passenger vehicles. I googled accidents on the 401 in 2017 and I was shocked at the number of fatalities.

It’s time to regulate the industry to the point where only the best operators remain in business. Governments need to do their part to separate semi and passenger vehicle traffic and driver’s of passenger vehicles need to learn exactly how dangerous our highways really are.

Stay away from Semi’s when you are driving on mixed traffic roads and be very aware of what’s behind you as well as what’s in front. Never be boxed in and always have an escape route.

If you’ve been following my BLOG you would know that I have been active in the local Open Mic community for several years now. The experience has been fun but also educational. Some hosts have it down to a science where others …

The best Open Mic’s are ones where the host actively promotes and encourages guests to fight back their stage fright and share their talent. This makes for a friendly atmosphere where musicians can bond and nurture new talent. Music and performing is not something that you just know how to do, it takes years of practise.

Some times people try really hard and they just can’t seem to find their place, but there are the diamonds like a 14 year old girl that showed up in her cut offs and cowboy boots and hammered out three songs that were written before she was born, like she had been doing it all her life.

I’ve watched hosts coach talent and develop it into acts worthy of their own stage.

That’s what Open Mic’s are for. Coaching, Bonding, Discovering, Entertaining and developing. The venues get free entertainment and fill seats with friends and family.

Unfortunately I’ve seen the other side of Open Mic’s as well. There are a few venues in my area where hosts use Open Mic’s to promote their friends and their own talent. These venues are not really open and hard to break into. I’ve also seen venues that advertise Open Mic’s where all of the talent is pre-selected and filtered to appeal to the audience.

I like being part of a support network for new and developing talent so I avoid the non-open Open Mic’s.

Check out my earlier BLOG posts for some of my favourite places in the Ottawa area and support your local musicians.

The last time I was in Mexico City I was talking to a friend about the Open Mic tour that I did in Ottawa. He suggested that I do an open mic in Mexico City.

I was in Mexico city this week so on Wednesday night I talked a bunch of people into going to the Black Horse for their Open Mic. It was a nice venue with a collection of local talent that were all quite impressive. There were people from Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, the USA and Canada. I know I said it was local talent well they all live in Mexico city now (Except me). There was a mix of English and Spanish songs, originals and covers and food and drinks.

I brought my voicelive pedal and some cables, borrowed a guitar and sang three songs.

My wife and Daughter decided that they wanted to do a Mother-Daughter trip so while they were away I took the opportunity to check out a different open-mic venue in the Ottawa area every night.

You might think that this would be a really fun thing for a performer to do, but it was actually a bit nerve racking. Each night there was a different host, different equipment and different crowds. I had one crowd where the average age was 70 and another one where the average age was 25.

It was good practice for changing up your set list on the fly.

All of the Venues turned out to be different but very welcoming and when it was all said and done, it was a lot of fun.

Night 2: Daniel O’Connell’s

If you were following me on Facebook or Instagram you would have seen the pictures. For those of you who don’t have me on social media, here are the highlights.

Sunday night was the only night where I could not find a place to play. Most of the Sunday night venues had been discontinued for the summer months.

Many of my friends tell me that they are “Too Old” to do something. It seems that the human race front loads our expectations with respect to life.

What am I talking about? Well, we are told by our parents, friends and colleagues that we should enjoy various aspects of life while we still can. No one tells you that you need to wait to enjoy something.

I can’t speak for anyone else, but I plan to enjoy life right up until the last few milliseconds. In order to do that, I will have to stay active and I expect that will get harder, so I’m preparing myself now. That aside, there is more to it than that.

What I recently realized is that in some cases we are missing the point with respect to aging and experiencing life. There are somethings that we cannot enjoy when we are young. In fact there are many things where timing is critical to maximizing the experience and if we are focusing on what we have lost as we age, we will miss them.

I hear you saying WTF, but consider this. I was born with a hyperactive sense of smell and taste. I could not use butter if someone else had used a knife with mustard on it to butter something. I could taste and smell the mustard and I found it overpowering.

Add fifty years to that same situation and we find that my senses have decreased and now I can enjoy many different types of mustards and other strong tastes and smells. In fact, I can now enjoy single malt scotch, something I couldn’t do when I was young. I can taste the subtle differences and appreciate the art involved.

Some people would say “I have acquired a taste for these things”, but that is not so in my case. I had to wait until my body was ready.

What else falls in this category? What other things in life require a change in your body to appreciate? Senses are continuously changing and we know that our bodies compensate. A blind person for example, will most likely have much sharper hearing. Does this happen with people in their “Golden Years” ?

Then there is the fact that we gain experience as we travel through life. When we heard a sound as a child, we could not appreciate it because we didn’t know what it was. With a life time of experience we can do things like pick out spices from the taste of our food and predict the weather by subtle changes in our environment. We can walk in a forest and hear different types of birds.

I have noticed that the changes in our bodies are different for each person and also seem to follow trends based on gender. This could be evolutionary based on historical gender roles. I’ve noticed that many women have their sense of smell become more acute with age. As a scientist I have to constantly ask the question why?

I challenge you to help me to build a road map or guideline to identify different experiences and what age we need to be to maximize that experience.

I was going to say It’s funny how … but it’s really not funny how time effects our ability to really listen and understand what people are saying.

When we listen to poetry or music, we can spend days or weeks trying to get the real meaning behind a lyric. In some cases writers have been know to stump listeners for years by creating lyrics that rhyme, but have no real meaning. Nik Kershaw wrote a song called “The Riddle” with beautiful lyrics that seemed like a real puzzle. He let people ponder over it for years before he admitted that there was no riddle, just words that rhyme.

If we can spend so much time trying to understand a lyric, why do we not spend as much time trying to understand what people are saying to us? I am as guilty as anyone else when it comes to this. I hear a person say something and my brain automatically picks what it thinks the meaning should be and I run with that. With some people it seems to work, but I have discovered that sometimes those people are just being polite and I have totally missed the point.

I was speaking to a phycologist friend recently who told me that the longer you know someone, the more likely you are to misinterpret what they say. We as humans tend to pigeon hole people and associate meaning with what we expect a person to say. As people evolve, our perception of the people does not always track, so we stop being able to effectively communicate.

This is not what I would have expected. With some work colleagues that speak publicly, I can usually tell you what they are going to say before they say it and I am right 90% of the time. I would have thought that the longer you know someone, the better you would be at predicting their behaviour. Turns out, this is not the case.

I suspect that there is some happy medium where we can improve our listening and analysis skills without taking hours to complete a conversation. That said, it wouldn’t hurt to stop every now and then to ask for clarification.